


this interminable life

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Chance Meetings, Literature, M/M, Romance, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 11:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>A chance encounter in Regent's Park changes nothing; means everything.</p><p>Inspired by the <a href="http://letsdrawsherlock.tumblr.com/post/48991974388/new-lets-draw-sherlock-challenge-reinterpreting">Let’s Draw Sherlock Challenge: Reinterpreting Famous Works</a>, reinterpreting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Dalloway"><i>Mrs Dalloway</i> by Virginia Woolf</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this interminable life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> For my darling V. Unbeta'd and Un-Britpicked. All recognizable bits are absolutely Virginia Woolf's.

It would be most convenient, of course, to blame the heat, the glare of the sun; the engines backfiring like enemy fire; it would be so much simpler if he could just blame the war.

But the fact is that John Watson’s always had a sliver of darkness woven deep into his marrow, twining long beneath his skin; the truth is that the shadows were salient, osmosive, and they sometimes lodged in his heart and hollowed rivers, staked some claim. 

The fact is that he’s had the perpetual sense, watching the cabs driving and the bodies milling and the breeze in the boughs of the trees: he’s simply never been able to shake the feeling of being out, out, far out to sea and alone, adrift, floating when he’d much rather drown, choking on the salt in the water but living, somehow, off the oxygen bound deep—he’s always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day, and that was the thrilling bit: that was the part that made it all worthwhile.

At first.

But he knows, now, that to live any more than that meant tedium, decay; a tremor in his hand for all the caged momentum in his languid heart—to live unending, unbothered, untested and pressed tight against the calm: that was the most dangerous of all.

Deserted, left alone and run ashore as he was, broken, he could hear the shouting, the begging: the whole world was clamouring: kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. And perhaps he should, perhaps he should throw himself forward into traffic, take a table knife, ugly; suck a gaspipe or swallow a hot bullet from the gun he should not be holding inside his coat pocket. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? 

He is too weak, can scarcely hold the weapon steady for the shake in his wrist, the feeble fingers that won’t obey; he is too strong, alone, condemned to the luxury of solitude, the freedom that only confines.

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”

The question comes from the heavens, from the ether, may or may not be spoken at all, might be something beat out by the chambers in his chest and so John doesn’t turn toward it, doesn’t acknowledge it, because it’s likely in his own mind, likely his own delusions; a deep voice, low and velveteen like the twilight line where the shadows dance for the sun to burn, the darkness just a charring, a dying without any depth.

“Fear no more, says the heart,” the voice carries on, and John watches the wind in the tree branches shift, the words changing the waves and the rhythms, and John’s own heart thumps beyond its means for a spare moment—speaking words in a language John doesn’t know, something twisted and foreign but so very smooth, and John knows, somehow, that the touch of it would match the velvet surrounding him, the whispers that might be real, might be fantasy, that continue to ring in his ears: “That wretched heart, that lying tomb committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.”

There is a scuffling to John’s side, a rustling of leaves, a scurrying of cosmic components and ashes and rain and it takes John a breath, a breath and an untrained inhale between when he sees the cloud of scant dust, the ripped blade of grass, the falling of disturbed earth upon the toes of his own shoes.

Movement. 

He looks up, and that’s when John sees him.

Darkness and lightness and feeling consume him as he forgets, as his lungs forget and he is dying in the desert; dusky curls, moonlight skin, the swell of lips and eyes, oh, eyes: some sea, John thinks, some sea where he is drowning and suffocating for it, where he is warm and never again alone. 

John’s heart thunders once, twice, and then breaks forth, a cacophony in its own right, and John hasn’t felt alive outside this moment since the sand wrenched hard against his skin, drew pits within the flesh of him and filled the holes with mortar, with lead.

He doesn’t think he could hallucinate this if he tried.

“Does it matter,” the demon starts, the godsend speaks: either one an apparition too solid to stand; “that we must inevitably cease?” 

He sounds genuinely curious, and when he turns those eyes like water through glass on John, unblinking, all the air in the world seems thin, insufficient. 

“All things decay, in the end,” the man says, oddly detached, strangely sad; “these flowers will wilt, this grass will die, the soil erode,” his eyes flicker up to the tops of the towers surrounding them, forts staving off some fray: “these buildings will tumble.” 

And something in John wants to speak, wants to meet this man in the crossing, the passing, to stand perhaps, and not lean against his cane, not tremble, to stand tall beside someone taller but to feel in his heart not cowed but matched, perhaps embraced by some eternal arms that reach through time, and it’s that, it’s that exactly that John wants to share, the words that have been churning, that have always been churning in his head, this morning as every other. He wants to tell this man, this man he feels drawn to for reasons he can’t name, wants to explain to him that nothing matters, nothing save that chatter-wretched monolith, obscured, defaced, corrupted in the code and lathered in lies and yet preserved, saved, pickled in the corroding breaths, because death was defiance, death was communication, death was the press of lips and the touch of skin and the acknowledgement that the centre is impossible, it cannot hold, it will always evade and yet to half the distance is to draw closeness apart at its seams. To embrace in death would always be rapture, and it need not elude for long.

John says nothing, but the stranger speaks as if he’s heard everything, knows the things John’s pulse pumps too hard for him to shape and say; the stranger speaks as if he is inside John’s heart and in John’s blood, propelled by the force of the unknown.

“Nothing remains.”

 _This could_ something whispers; the heart, perhaps, _fear no more_ , but John doesn’t know what _this_ is, or why it should remain, and his chest feels incomprehensibly small, suddenly.

The world feels vast and unfettered.

“Is it not consoling to believe that death ends absolutely?” the man asks him, and John admires the clean lines of his suit, the long leanness of the body encased within; the way the aubergine of the shirt contrasts with the flowers, blooming only to die, its buttons straining when lungs draw breath, a promise: this will end, this will end, but hold tight while it remains; yet why?

“It’s comforting, yes?” the stranger carries on “The idea that time itself, and our space inside of it will forever erase our transgressions?” He looks at John, who feels seen and known as he never has before: “That our very limitations give us glimpses of the infinite?”

Words, answers, confessions to a god somewhere tickle at the back of John’s tongue, but still, they go nowhere. He cannot speak.

The stranger sighs, closes his eyes for a moment, steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

“What is meaning?” John’s voice is hoarse, and he’s surprised by its appearance, its escape; the man’s eyes fly open, he turns, considers John with a quirked brow and dear lord, his cheekbones cut through the sunlight, refract it: unseemly, unprecedented.

There is silence, until John clears his throat, makes way for his words.

“When you say the world is without meaning, what is it exactly that all this lacks?”

John doesn’t know where the question comes from, the slight contention that laces it: he knows what the world lacks, he feels it deep within himself, sodden and weighty and unbearable, grey and insignificant, except not in this moment, not here and now because the world seems to speak, like his visions and his beating heart, all caught up in each other, separate syllables and pangs and moans all coming together to make something new and improbable, unthinkable: _Beauty_ , the world seemed to say, seemed to spring instantly, all quivering leaves and shivering ventricles, swooping swallows and stomachs and the sun on land and skin, fences and bone structures and blades of grass, dazzling—all exquisite and unfathomable joy, and eyes that spoke colourless colour, ordinary love, extraordinary truth.

Beauty was everywhere.

“To love makes one solitary.”

The stranger reads his mind again. John thinks him beautiful, believes him an unfathomable fool; dreams of him between the blinking of his eyes like a night passed, an eternity spent: writes poems to him between the veins of his forearm; poems which, ignoring the subject, disregarding the sentiment and the taste, this unfathomable soul standing before him would unavoidably correct in red ink, no—red blood, John thinks, and the taste would change accordingly.

“To love makes one so very much entwined,” John says, because he needs extrication and entanglement in equal measure, in impossible balance and brevity, and the world cannot hold a need like that, these equations were written with other souls in mind.

“To love makes one vulnerable,” the man tells him, doesn’t counter, just states it: a proposition, waiting for comment, rebuttal.

“To love makes breathing a joy,” John exhales, the words, the conviction coming from a place he can’t name or touch or stand; “rather than a trial.”

His heart skips, knows it’s true even as the world wavers, quivers; threatens to burst into flames.

“Sherlock!” the call comes from beyond them, beyond the bubble turning, iridescent and shimmering around them—dented, now, but resistant to the intrusion; fragile, and ready to burst but persisting for reasons John can’t guess at, doesn’t wish to. The stranger—Sherlock—he glances briefly to the source of the summons: a man and his umbrella, and it’s all so very simple, all so very absurd, and where John wants to laugh for the first time in what feels like decades, Sherlock frowns, and his chest heaves, and his breathing comes quick, those strange eyes darting until they settle on John, half-afraid.

Weightless.

“There is no reason for it,” Sherlock whispers, lost and anchored in all that is seen and never cherished; an offering for the sake of offering, perhaps, and in so being, it would never be enough, it would always be too much.

“There is no reason for it, but I have the strongest inclination that you will fall.”

John does chuckle now, mirthless, and his stomach feels hollow as his heart brims, too full. 

“And I don’t suppose you’d be the sort to catch me.” It’s a death sentence, it’s an answered prayer, and John doesn’t know just yet if it’s the best or worst thing he’s ever known.

“No,” Sherlock agrees, and it stings. “But for even fewer reasons,” Sherlock stares at him, into him, sussing out the universe and the wild thrum of his heart: “I think I would fall with you,” he breathes; “if you asked me to leap by your side.”

“I wouldn’t ask you,” John mouths, the voice in him muffled, choked with deft hands that cling desperately to something that was never his to hold.

Sherlock blinks, throat working around a swallow. “It’s possible I might fall anyway.”

Sherlock draws close between the pulsing in John’s chest, Sherlock’s pupils are wide gaps in the world that John can imagine falling into without ever looking for an out, and if John could move, he could press lips to that mouth—if John could move, he could know a different infinity, a crueler embrace.

“This is nonsense,” he gasps, uncanny, because it is, even as it makes the only sense John knows.

“What does the brain matter?” Sherlock whispers, and the exhale tastes of nicotine and honey, violent and smooth, and John’s eyes slide closed when Sherlock’s mouth moves, an echo of feeling and a promise of more.

The beckoning call of the man with his brolly cuts through to them once more, and the glycerine shudders, the bubble heaves and pops: it was over—the moment, and John feels it necessary to look anywhere, save at his damning saviour, leaning close but pulled by something else, tugged by something far and foreign, beyond them both.

“Come back tomorrow,” Sherlock tells him as he straightens, as his feet falter and he makes to move: not a question, so much pleading but it’s not necessary because death will wait, those arms don’t close.

John nods. “Tomorrow.”

Five minutes into the walk back to his flat, John realises he’s left his cane at the park.


End file.
